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The Future of eSports

The
Future of eSports

The
recent discussions and issues in eSports have caught my
attention and I thought about the future of eSports.

Introduction

“In
my opinion eSports most certainly have a bright future. Things that
are happening now and numbers involved with eSports, such as the number
of competitive games, international LAN events and the number of
people watching these events, as well as the money involved is
something that I simply couldn’t imagine 10 years ago. When
you look at it from a certain angle, you will see that eSports is all
about people spending their time together on events all over the
world, sharing great moments together and most importantly - doing
what they love, together with people from all over the globe.
And, as for myself, I think this is one of the best things about
eSports. However, with lots of money being involved, everything has
to be done in a certain way, and that is a professional way. There
are many people already working strictly professional for companies,
organisations as well as themselves. The most important thing is - they all have the same goal and that is to expand and develop eSports as much as they can. That is what matters the most.
I'm sure if we keep developing eSports, and if everyone gives his/her
best, we will grow along with the community we love, and raise it on
a different, even more professional level.”
- Andreja Mahovic, former Professional Gamer.

We
all see that the community is growing and the entire scene is
improving, money is involved and people are interested, but is that
enough for a bright future of eSports ?

Naturally
the people who are interested in gaming are becoming more and more,
but I think this can not only be contributed to gaming itself,
but comes along with the technical progress.

Yet
this does not mean a bright future for eSports in General, as
there is still a huge majority of people who think Gaming is only
something for males and nerds. The problem is that they don´t have
access to this community and do not know what it is about. Spending 8
hours in front of the computer is still frowned upon the society, but
spending 10 hours on your smart-phone and computer on social networks
on the other hand is not. The question is how can we, as the
community and the scene reach out to the people and make eSports
something “normal” in the modern society.

It
is for sure, that this is not possible by just waiting and keeping
the status quo, but by gaining stability and professionalism towards
the outside.

Professionalism:
The way to success

With
good cause, professionalism plays an important role in Esport. The
times, in which eSports had the reputation of being a sport for
retarded nerds, who battle themselves on imaginary Battlefields in
order to gain the acceptance they did not gain in the real life, is
over. Outsides of Korea, eSports is building up a certain degree of
esteem, but the steps from being on the fringes of a youth-culture,
to a public awareness are not easy. The scene has to cause a stir
without producing scandals. Yet it is true, that negative spotlights
create interest from the outside, but too much negative recognition
and a bad reputation will not attract any sponsors. Without sponsors,
no money, and without money, no eSports. Even with all the possible
human idealism, without money you will not be able to change
something. The costs for Esport events are growing - the audience
wants to be entertained. In order to cover these costs, money has to
be available and money doesn't come just by looking good.

The sponsors
are the organisations who bring the money and they want to reach
people, they want to advertise. The more people follow something, the
more interesting it is for sponsors to invest there. Professionalism
is the corner stone for the survival in the public media. If eSports
really wants to evolve to something, so that it is not only term for
people who already follow the games, it has to be accepted in the
society. The idea is to present the players and the games without
scaring the audience away with some “drama”. Nobody wants to
invest into a business, in which contracts are not kept and for
instance the players, the main attraction, are not paid.

Nobody
wants to put their name on an organisation which is represented in a
bad way, because this behaviour directly falls back on the sponsors.
You could probably write books about the topic of professionalism in
general, though, a start could be that players, organisations, journalists and of course the community respect each other, which
unfortunately is not always the case.

Creating
Stability

Therefore,
professionalism and cohesion are one of the main aspects. You cannot
try to devise to the outside but still have problems in the inside.

First
of all, in order to create a solid basis, on which the entire scene
can make steps towards the outside, every instance in the gaming
community has to show and act professional. Valve is in my opinion a
pioneer in this matter. Implementing features to watch games and a
good software for casters is a way to contribute to the
professionalism. Although, casting has been a part of the electronic
sport since the first days of Warcraft 3 or Counterstrike. This is
not enough yet. Regarding this, Korea is a good example, as there are
independent organisations who are trying to handle parts of the
scene. The first step in Europe should be, to create something like
the Fifa is for Football. This organisation should not be like the
Kespa in Korea, controlling everything, but an independent
organisation which keeps tracks of players, tournaments and the
rules. If there is an authority which has the possibility to sanction
teams and players, there would not be any situations such as Stephano
posting something very offending on stream or teams not paying their
players and more. Currently, if a player, a team or an organisation
neglects a contract there is no entity to punish them.

The
idea is not permanent supervision, but something or someone who has
power over certain parts of the community. What happens if a player
or a team would really misbehave during a tournament ? Maybe they
will be dispelled for the next season from that, and this is it.
Unfortunately this is not enough. Sometimes it is necessary to
inflict fines or a ban from all tournaments for a certain period of
time. This does not have to mean that players are in contract with
such an entity. They can still play for the organisation, but the
organisation should be in a contact with this superior company.
Moreover tournaments can be monitored as well as player performances,
because whatever game they play will be reported to them. This also
creates a solid database of players and teams with advanced
statistics on which Sponsors etc can revert to. Transferring players
will become easier because there is the “middle man” who can help
with the communication. Finally such and entity can solve discussions
we were recently able to observe regarding the Journalism in eSports.
Of course there are several aspects to consider in order to make this
possible, but this is one way to create a solid basis on which
eSports works.

Teamwork and Internal Communication

Secondly
this is of course a process which runs over years and cannot be
achieved by only one organisation or player. We all have to work
towards this goal, which does not mean to give up the competitive
attitude. Competition rather helps this idea. But in certain aspects,
the teams, organisations and of course sponsors have to work
together. Journalism is only one aspect of that. But also hosting a
tournament should not be on the shoulders of one organisation, rather should
two teams or organisations find themselves together, to host a better
event than only one organisation could do, whether it comes to the
financial support or just the manpower of setting up the stage or the
hardware. If the Quality, not the quantity, of the events improve,
more people get interested by eSports and more people carry it out to
friends, classmates or colleagues. There is no use of eight
tournaments in one month if they are all badly organised, not
properly covered by casters and journalists and due to the fact that
there are 7 other competitions, no big names are competing in them.

So
if there is maybe one good tournament per month, everybody would
contribute from it. Because there is a good media coverage, more
people watch and follow the event, which again helps the sponsors to
justify their investments. No sponsor is interested to be one of the
8 tournament hosts, and they know they have to spend too much to
meet their required numbers. If these eight sponsors and their teams
would just communicate with each other these problems would be solved
without any issues. Yet this does not mean that weekly cups and leagues
should be canceled. We have the same issue with the coverage of news.
If Journalism groups split up the content, which of course has to be
fair, we would avoid the mass of content which lacks quality, because
the author has another three events to cover that day.

Change
in the Attitude of the Community

Finally,
the the mentality of the community has to change. The idea of “I am on the Internet and here I can get everything for free” is
contra-productive. It is a sad truth, but without money you cannot
reach anything in this world and sponsors should not be the only
income of an organisation. Dota 2 can be taken as the best possible
example as Valve is already trying to give money back to to the
communit, by sharing their income of selling tournament watch
tickets and Pennants. Streaming pages are already starting to do the
same. But if the attitude of the community does not change, and they keep on not to be
willing to pay only a small amount for their enjoyment, the economy
of eSports will not make any progress.

The Result

If
this base is strong enough to absorb mistakes such as the current
Journalism issue, we, as the community, can start the journey toward the
outside. Then if mistakes are made, they can be solved without
reflecting discredit towards the sponsors, teams or players. Then we can
use the portals such as mobile gaming, independent news pages and social media to promote the idea of gaming. As we can see at the moment,
we are not stepping forwards, because the current base is not good
enough. The first problems are neutralising any progress made.

Conclusion

All
in all I think eSports is already heading in the right direction, but
there are some factors which are slowing down the progress of making
gaming an accepted lifestyle among the mainstream. Gaining the
internal stability will help a lot to achieve anything related to
eSports. There have to be some long term investments such as sharing
media, splitting up content and stepping down on publishing content
which another page has posted days ago. Perhaps the viewer count
drops for a while but after a certain time, the entire scene grows
and then the investment pays of due to the fact that there are in
general more people to follow news coverage, streams and players.
This again attracts the sponsors and then this effect will snowball.

Huge shoutout to Markus "Dr.Schoko" G. for his help and inspiration. This text only represents the personal opinion of the authors.

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4 comments

Well written. There are so many things that do need to change to improve e-sports. One of the biggest problems is all organisations are fighting for the same pool of money out there from Sponsors.

Until event organisers start sharing royalties with teams from events,we will never be able to progress because everything is so uncertain. We provide the teams to compete and make all these events possible but get no recognition or support from Organisations running the events.
There needs to be far more cooperation between teams and organisations. We are all trying to achieve the same thing. Again event organisations are also sharing the same pool of money, all that has happened in the last year is streaming revenue has bolstered event organisers income but with no sharing with teams.
Also players need to understand that for their organisations to survive they have to be able to generate some income from their top teams, Sponsorship just isn't enough. We are all businesses that must make income to survive, players seem to have an attitude we take all their money, I just wish they'd stop and think where do teams get money from.

In your section regarding stability you liken many of you beliefs on how to improve eSports to structures that exist in every day sports –not entirely sure if this was your intention, but I do agree, it works in sports such as Soccer, Baseball, American Football etc. so why not apply it to eSports, right?

Thing is, the idea of a governing body, a higher authority brings with it challenges that plague the world today in sports such as Soccer, biased opinions, corrupt board members and a rigid structure. That being said, let’s explore the role of someone like the FA or FIFA to Soccer in the UK, if we are to start treating eSports as instead simply a ‘Sport’, we have to learn from the bodies that regulate them currently.

Teams, acting professional? Absolutely. Sponsors acting professional? You’d expect so. Players acting professionally? You’d hope so… but it isn’t always the case, and to be fair we shouldn’t judge individual people too harshly, we are after all human. What is it, ‘to err is to be human’? A total ban is out of the question, but should there be penalties in general, fines or suspensions, sure. I believe these governing bodies can exist throughout eSports without having to resolve to one entity. Events regulate themselves and can ban or suspend players should they wish.

One thing they should do, is conduct the event to a set of rules, a set of standards that governs and ensures that players, sponsors, attendees alike are treated in a certain way and should issues arise there are clear ways in order to deal with them.

A charter if you will, everyone signs it, Dreamhack, MLG, all the smaller guys too.

That’s your first step to bringing more structure to eSports.

I like your ideas about tournaments but again lets liken it to Soccer, a world wide tournament can exist (World Cup), European tournaments can exist (Champions league amongst others) and smaller local events can exist (think 5-aside matches at your local park). To assume that everyone will work together unfortunately is somewhat of a dream, don’t get me wrong I agree, it’d be better for everyone but it won’t just happen.

This brings me back to the charter. Every successful business has a charter, a set of rules of a goal that defines their success or failure. Such a charter would unite teams, sponsors and events. This would improve quality, and consistency. Imagine if you will the additional confidence gained by sponsors if they know a certain event is works to a quality standard that is industry recognized. You can compare this to things like the ISO2001 or ISO19001 quality standards in business.

Lead and follow. For the community to change, we, eSports, teams, events, organisers and sponsors must change first. It is naïve to think that our customers will be the ones who will do this for us, we must be the catalyst to allow them to improve eSports. To build or to rely on a business model that counts significantly on revenue created by people paying to watch events online would be flawed, we live in a world now where everything is on demand on the internet, everything whether you try to stop it is free. This is where eSports can grow however, don’t worry I’m not saying it’s a lost cause, by constantly improving the events, ensuring a consistent standard and defining good quality people will WANT to pay to watch the events.

Spotify, Netflix etc, great models. They aren’t expensive, they do not rely on high subscription fees, they (Netflix at least…, Spotify is in a little financial trouble, woops) ensure the quality of their service is number one so that people don’t mind paying the money.

For the record, Twitch.TV are doing just this, their quality has gone up and up and I believe they are one of the few companies out there that have the right idea about things. Go Twitch!

In conclusion, eSports IS heading in the right direction, but teams need to smarten up to more efficient models. Revenue cannot be generated simply from sponsors, but must extend to online content, endorsement, a higher standard of event management and cooperation.

To grow we must all set a standard, one we all agree to work by and to, one that sponsors can rely on, one that is clear and fair. Improving confidence to our sponsors and customers is key.

One step at a time.

Finally, I will draft up a charter, or what I think we should do. I’m happy to host the signing of said charter at my house, someone will need to bring beers, oh and I need a gardener to clear a Helipad for Sundance. I assume he flys a helicopter, not sure why. Seems like that type of guy.

I share your opinion and your arguements, but you have to see, that this is not an article about how it should be, but what we COULD do to improve. Naturally there are more than enough problems to assemble these ideas. But I did not write it because I dont think eSports is heading in the right direction, but as you already mentioned, to provoke. Like this, people think about the issue and discuss it, like you did. This is my main intention. I am not in the position to change the scene, unfortunately ;). And seeing that you spend that much time writing your comment makes me feel as if I at least reched one person. I would bring the Beer btw ;)

P.s: Twitch is in my opinion a rolemodel and more Organisations could work like this.

Lukas, don't underestimate the power of a well written article. To steal another quote, tis but a drop in the ocean, well yes, but what is the ocean but a multitude of drops?

I understand you didn't state that's how it should be, but rather how it could be. I think we're on the same page for the most part, there are many things that we could do to improve the scene and to raise the standard we've come to expect. Keep writing, ultimately keep asking questions and don't be afraid to ask the difficult ones.